FEEL IT TWICE

chapter 10 - ballads & buttons

Camila stared at Shawn. "What are we going to do? How do we get out?"

"The timer has reset, it thinks it's night time."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Well, the timer leaves the door unlocked during the day and automatically locks it for night. Normally, we'd just be able to walk out, but now we have to wait until the timer thinks it's daytime again. That could be in an hour or in twelve hours."

"So we're not stuck in here permanently then, so that's good."

"Yep, that's good." He said, not sounding like it was good at all. He looked around and she used her phone to sweep the barn. To call it a barn was doing it an injustice, because although it was home to tools, the generator and the chickens, it was really just an extension of the house. It had a concrete floor, which had underfloor heating, for the chickens. And it didn't smell particularly wonderful, diesel fumes and chicken dung and damp straw. But it was warm. She saw some camping equipment stored against a wall and walked to it. There were a couple of folding camp chairs, and sleeping bags. She pulled them out and Shawn joined her, seeing her intent, and they set up two chairs near the broken door and unzipped the sleeping bags so they each had a blanket to put over them, then made themselves comfortable. On the other side of the door, Hagrid was scrabbling and whining.

"Well, thankfully he can get to the atrium or we would have had a mess to clean up when we got out," Shawn said.

"Oh look, they've come to keep us company!" Camila exclaimed. The chickens were so cute, feeding them had become her job, she loved to chat to them and knew all their names.

"Hi Cilla, hello Polly," she said to the black and brown chickens.

"Polly?"

"Polly Brown, a singer from the seventies."

"How do you know these things?"

"It was in Maggie's book. She gives a little description of each chicken and where their name comes from. And I found the song on one of Maggie's old tapes. "Up In A Puff of Smoke". She began to sing the song, a soapy pop song.

Like a bubble
Headed for trouble
Wind is blowing
In the wrong direction
I was headed into danger
Too much in love to see

I pledged my trust in him
Believed in everything
Just had me on a string
And then he let me blow away

And now it's going
Up, up, up in a puff of smoke
It ain't no joke the way
He broke my heart
Going up, up, up in a puff of smoke
And I'm all choked up inside
To see my dreams just
Turn into ashes and all my
Hopes go up in a puff of smoke

As she sang the silly song, she realised the words still resonated. That was how she had felt when they broke up. She finished it by humming the last bars, letting it trail off.

Her voice hit him in a place only she could reach, even singing a meaningless old pop song like that. The fact that she had made friends with the chickens. That she wasn't panicking about being locked in the smelly barn for potentially hours. She amazed him in so many ways.

"What are the others' names?" he found himself asking, just to hear her talk about them, or maybe sing another song.

"This one is Georgey, after the song "Hey There Georgey Girl", I can't remember how that one goes. This one is Lulu, after the singer, from the movie "To Sir With Love". Ugh I love that movie, Sidney Poitier was a God." She began to sing, and he forgot to breathe for a moment. Even though the song was a student singing to a teacher in the movie, he felt some of the words as if she had just written them, for him.